The IAMP ID College Workshop Success

Introduction

ID College is a prestigious training centre with locations across the Netherlands. Placing Individuality and Identity at the core of their efforts the college strives to ensure that students not only have access to the very best in education and expertise but just as importantly students choose courses that are right for them. The issue of correct placement is of course a struggle for every MBO college but one that ID College takes extremely seriously.

IamProgrez approached ID College with a proposition: Using our Iam-IT game platform we could quickly and accurately assess their ICT students and reliably report which students had chosen courses that were right for them (and those who had not). ID College quickly realized the benefits of conducting such an event and gave the go ahead for a Pilot Run.

IamP built an MVP Pilot of our 3.0 Iam-IT platform that the ID College students could engage with. The core functionality of the Pilot platform would capture students attention and see them face a wide variety of challenges, trials and exercises – all specifically engineered to reveal their inner aptitudes in a gamified environment designed with the best principles of Gamification. To ensure maximum success for the students a small team, lead by myself, would be sent along in order to support ID College and their students.

The Event

The initial proposal was for IamP to run one two workshops, twice a day, with 50 students for each workshop from the 26th to the 27th August 2015 in Zoetermeer. This was quickly expanded to another workshop in Gouda for an additional 100 students.

For the workshops themselves students were given a minimal amount of information about the game as to not interfere with the ultimate purpose of the Pilot. They were simply informed to register at a designated website with their school account and they would be given some questions to answer regarding their study choices. Each student was asked to complete as many Quests as possible ( a Quest on Iam-IT is 2 small questions and 1 larger question) and would be told at the end which workshop class performed the best.
During the workshop IamP team members would patrol the workshops to answer questions and assist with any problems should they arise. At the end I would do a small evaluation and reveal the winning workshop.

The Result

IamP knew we had designed something special but neither myself nor ID College could have predicted the level of engagement our Iam-IT system had on the students. We thought going in that the students would on average complete about 10 Quests each (around 30 questions in total) and that the ‘winning’ student would be determined by the highest number of quests completed. In the end the winning student was actually determined by the first student (out of many) who completed the entire game!

I soon realized our expectations would be blown away when, during my first introductory speech to the initial workshop, a number of students had already finished registered and began completing their first Quests. This soon snowballed into the entire workshop fired up and questing away- a massive achievement when you consider this was 50 students completely focused on the game for roughly 2 hours. This level of engagement was the norm across the workshops with hundreds of students in rapt attention for hours at a time. All of the teachers present at each workshop were amazed not only with the concentration of their students but also with their desire to play. Many students chose not to stop Questing during designated breaks but were instead committed to answering quests and finishing the Iam-IT game instead.

Over a course of two days we completed 6 workshops (300 students in total), with each workshop a complete success, clearly revealing the base appeal and attraction of the Iam-IT platform. What was interesting to note was the performance of the Level 2 students. On average Level 2 classes are generally regarded as the more difficult classes to teach when compared to students in Levels 3 and 4. While Level 2 students scored lower in the game than the Level 3 and 4 classes, which was a clear indicator of how accurate our system was, the Level 2’s were as equally engaged time wise with the Iam-IT game as the other Levels were. This high level engagement is not the norm for Level 2 which for me truly showcased the power Gamification has in reaching students where traditional methods do not.

Overall the event was a fantastic achievement which exceeded not only ID College’s expectations but mine as well. All that’s left now is for me to finish assessing the work produced by these students last week – which has turned out to be a whole lot more than even I was expecting.